Lynx expands, steps up B2C operations
Significant growth in business-to-consumer deliveries is planned for the coming year by Lynx Express, and the company is also extending its “in-night” delivery service for field engineers to collections from continental suppliers. Xerox is one of the first customers to benefit.
To enhance its UK capacity, Lynx is spending £3.5 million on a new Vanderlande “shoe sorter” mechanised sortation machine, which will be installed on a mezzanine level in one of its two hubs at Nuneaton. Currently only one of these is mechanised. The new facility will double potential throughput to 400,000 shipments a night by next year.
“We’re very confident in the future of the company,” managing director David Burtenshaw reported at a briefing in March, adding that there was no intention of selling its services cheaply to fill the extra capacity. “We’re not falling into that trap.”
Lynx currently represents a success story in a difficult market. It turnover for its latest financial year was up 8 per cent to £160 million, and operating profits were up 24 per cent. It now claims to be the biggest independent parcels carrier in the UK.
The company is investing a further £3 million on a new integrated IT system, which it is calling “e-Lynx”. This will bring together various discrete systems in use now, and introduce barcoding across the board, allowing Lynx to offer a full Web-based track and trace system to customers. Currently about 20 per cent of its 5,000 customers still don’t use barcodes.
The new system will include driver computers with signature capture capability. Initially POD data will be downloaded in batch mode at the end of each shift, but a real-time wireless-based option may be added later.
The expanded Partsflow operation will make use of a new facility at Coventry airport, and will mean that parts ordered from continental suppliers in Germany, France and the Netherlands can be collected, shipped and delivered in the UK by next morning. It uses the resources of Lynx’s Euro Express partners to handle collections, channelling goods through the Lynx hub at Eindhoven.
Lynx’s partnership with the US Postal Service is now up and running, handling “several tonnes” of US-bound freight from the UK every night. Key products include books, textiles and consumer goods bought on the Internet. Growth in traffic from the Continent has been slower than expected, Burtenshaw admits, but ways are being sought to address this.
